Captainwow

Friday, January 30, 2004

Going in Circles

Just got off the phone with US BANK. Did you know that if you have a corporate credit card account with several cards on it and you pay off the balance -- people's who's cards are maxed out still can't USE them until the NEXT STATEMENT CYCLE!?
Ok so I said, "What is the point of me calling in the payment by phone?" She says:
"Well then it's paid off. "
"But now I have someone in Albequerque trying to make flight changes and rent a car and she can't use her card anyway?"
"Yes that's right."
"So the card isn't paid off, then, is it?"
"Yes, it is. See, you don't understand how our system works...."
"Yes, yes I think I do understand how this works. Excuse me for interrupting you. Let me see if I've got this straight: I can pay the account off every day of the year by phone -- every hour on the hour even, if I want to, but these people still can't use their cards until the next billing cycle date. And there is no way for me to pay any balances on anyone's individual cards."
"Yes, that's what I'm saying."
"Ok then we're on the same page. Here's my frustration: when I called and asked what do I do when one of our employees gets declined on their card and someone from your customer service told me no problem just pay it by phone - that might have been an ideal time for someone to inform me that I very well could pay it by phone but that I would be wasting my time because those folks out on the road still won't be able to use their cards until Febrary 9."
"Well maybe that would have been better, Yes, Ma'am."
"And this is now turning into circular conversation, isn't it?" "Yes, Ma'am, it is." "Because you can't help with this issue, can you?"
"No, I wish I could but there's nothing I can do."
"Ok then, I'll shut up now."
"OK." "Can I help you with anything else?"
"No, no I don't think so. Have a nice day."
"Thank you for calling US Bank."

Did you know Diet Coke doesn't even FREEZE!! It's like ANti Freeze. Seriously. Had a bottle of water in my car and a Diet Coke and the water was frozen solid but not the Diet Coke.

Not that all that sugar is good for me but do you really think that something that WON'T EVEN FREEZE can POSSIBLY BE ANY GOOD AT ALL FOR THE BOD!?!?
BLECHK! OK if it tasted amazingly wonderful that might be one thing. But it doesn't. Not even close.
anyway. ahem.

In other news, I stayed at the Best Western last night. My apologies if you are reading this and I could have stayed at your house for free. I didn't want to be around anyone, or talk or catch up I just wanted to veg out with CABLE TV and do nothing interactive. Having said that, I had a good time.

I have a little overnight kit in my office for occasion like this. Having learned the hard way - it's nice to just have this stuff around. Super duper cheap hotels don't stock stuff like toothpaste, shampoo or anything like that. I did not know that. Now I do.

So last night was no problem, I found a room and had my handy dandy overnight kit all ready to go. I found a check in my purse the other day for an expense report I turned in at work a month ago or so. I thought it was for like $12 or something like that. Went to cash it last night and it was for $28! YEE HAW! So, I thought I'd treat myself to a really nice take out dinner. YUM.
I ordered a steak and a potato and cottage cheese (instead of nasty salad) - nice American Meal GRRRRR - lots of PROTEIN! When I finally got to the room, my cell phone was ringing. It was the take out guy apologizing for not including my cottage cheese. Very nice of him to call, I thought. I told him "No problem it's too ikky for me to want to drive back for it. Don't worry, there's plenty of food here!" I was in a good mood and I really didn't care and I was so hungry I couldn't wait to eat!
So, I settled down to enjoy my wonderful dinner and soon discovered there was NO SILVERWARE!
None.

So that was a first for me. I ate a steak and a baked potato WITH MY HANDS!!
Note to self: Add emergency silverware to the overnight kit.
Just in case.

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Plonderings, Wanderings, and Wonderings

Played my flute some this weekend. Badly.
It sounded like I was on 'ludes. But it felt GREAT.

We found Pat a bridesmaid dress last night. I didn't think I was stressing about it but the relief is huge so I must have been. She looked great in everything she put on of course. What she chose is absolutely fabulous dahlink!

1 dress down 2 to go.
102 days to go
99 things to do

So there, that's enuffabout that.

Today's brew is Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, and today's slew included getting my hand and arm sprayed with coke trying to get the last coke out of the machine for Linda. I pulled too hard on it and it broke, spraying coke all over the place. But it was worth it. She needs to feed her coke habit. And I need to help with feed her coke habit, so I think that might be enabling but we're both OK with that for now.

Speaking of freaking out, (which we WEREN'T!) here's a question for ya. It was on one of my Bday cards this weekend.
If a tree falls in the forest and then springs back upright as a joke, do the squirrels freak out?

Friday, January 23, 2004

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Florence Nightingale

One of my favorite memories came back to me the other day and again this morning.
I was listening to a flute piece called Pan et les oiseaux - which, translated is Pan and the Birds. I'm pretty sure the composer was trying to imitate a nightingale.
Anyway, a few years ago the Ice Cream Troll and I bombed around Colorado/Utah in a rental car with a wimpy engine. We threw a tent and some camping gear in the truck and we stayed wherever we ended up. It was one of the best vacations I've had in my not so very long yet life. One night we were staying in Utah not too far from Monument Valley. It was a pretty great campsite. We were going to bed around dark usually, since we were tired by then and there isn't a TON to do after dark anyway. Since we went to bed so early we'd wake up early too and sometime early the in the AM I dreamed that my friend Annie was singing this incredible tune. I thought to myself "how can anyone sing like that?" It was amazing. It was WAY too many notes for a human voice to sing but it was incredibly beautiful! I started thinking "Wow, she sort of sounds like a bird!" Slowly, I started waking up and realizing it wasn't Annie singing at all. It WAS a bird. But I'd never heard a bird quite like that so I woke up Ice Cream and said what IS that bird? She said it was a nightingale, and I lay there and listened for a while, enjoying waking up slow, and eventually that bird quit singing and the others started in and the sun came up and the day began.
That there was one of the top 10 mornings in my not so very long yet life.

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Laffy Taffy

I love Laffy Taffy. The banana ones taste like Circus Peanuts. I love those too.
They taste like Banana Laffy Taffy and I really love that stuff because it tastes like Circus Peanuts.
So if you sat me at a table full of banana Laffy Taffy and Circus Peanuts I'd be really really happy for a good long time. Then I'd get bored, or sick.
Anyway, if you were wondering what my point is, I feel it's only fair for me to tell you that there is no point.
I just felt like sharing.
Oh, and if YOU like Circus Peanuts too, there's
THIS RECIPE. I may have to try it soon. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Friday, January 16, 2004

WHEW!

Quiz Results (I took this test today)
Points: 67
After extensive research, our crack team of psychologists have classified you as "moderately annoying." Not to worry though, it is perfectly acceptable to annoy others sparingly. It reminds them that you still exist.

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Chatting with Cheerios

I saw a funny thing last night. I was driving home, and I noticed that there were brown papery things flying all over the highway. Sort of reminded me of leaves, but there's lots of snow on the ground so it couldn't be leaves I thought to me. Then I noticed there was this big truck, like the kind you usually see hauling dirt or something. Big dirty dirt truck with a red cab and lots of grime on it. As I got closer I could see these papery pieces were flying out of it and there was something brownish orange piled up past the top of it, fluttering out all these pieces. So I scooted up behind it to investigate this truck. Turns out it was an onion truck - piled high with onions, their brown papery skins flying all over the place. That's LOTs OF ONIONS, quite the haul there. I was talking on the phone at the time and our call got dropped and we picked it up and it got dropped again and so in between I had some thoughts.

And I very clearly "heard" inside myself this: "I need to play my flute."
So I'm not going to try to tell you what the link is there between onions and flute playing because there is none that I know of, it just happened in that order. So today, or soon I will be buying some music and learning some new stuff just for fun. Seems like maybe I'm ignoring a part of myself that shouldn't be ignored so I'm going to try that and see if it seems right in the actual doing of it.
Seems it would be good for me to actually use my gifts, play my flute, express that part of me.
If I'd dreamed about that onion truck I would have said it was symbolic of all the layers of me and some of the unused, dried up unnecessary layers are blowing away in the wind because they are no longer needed. But I didn't dream it, it was real - or at least I'm pretty sure that I had a grip on reality at that moment. So it's just an interesting sight in my memory banks now. Completely mundane but possibly not.

Monday, January 12, 2004

Check out imploding heart on the right there under links for a great post on needy vs wanty. Interesting chewing for thinky thoughts.

What reminded me of it was eating a grapefruit just now and tying that in with a conversation I had at Little Mexico with Lois, Cheryl and Jane the other night. We were discussing "addictive personality". Seems to me that it is a human condition but some are more prone to others. For instance it is widely known worldwide that I am addicted to coffee. I am OK with this for now. There will come a time when my body will not tolerate the caffeine anymore and I'll quit it. Until then, slurp slurp! This ties in with needing and wanting because while I may not be needy ALL the time I am sometimes very wanty - and occasionally I wander into needy. Maybe we're splitting hairs here but today I ate the other half of the grapefruit I ate on Friday. With Salt. And a little sugar too. I thought. hm. Another half would be great.
While I was peeling this half of the grapefruit I thought about how I only have patience to peel a half of one at a time. Cause I learned from Pat that if you take the membrane off the inside fruity part it isn't bitter. So this takes a good long time I guess until one gets good at it. Patience isn't my best attribute normally so I find it a stretch to mess around with an entire grapefruit in this fashion. Anyway, it seemed to me that it might be a good thing - this peeling a grapefruit and having to wait for a less bitter piece of fruit and sit and contemplate while doing it. Gives me time to slow down and be quiet.
We watched The Last Samurai this weekend and Kevin and I were both struck by the quietness and how the movie made us both long for that quietness of spirit talked about in the movie. So where am I going with this?
aha, I knew you'd ask.
There's a link between my level of patience, my quietness of spirit and my level of needy/wanty-ness. Inversely proportional you might say. Less of one, more of the other, etc. So while I'm needing/wanting grapefruit all the time lately, I'm still getting the benefit of quietness while patiently peeling the thing. Seems like a spiritual thing to me.

Friday, January 09, 2004

Bull Oney

So anyway, it's Friday now, and I'm pretty geeked about that. I just heard Paula making noises in the hallway about Happy Hour so it looks like a drinky might be in our near future.

I slept on and off last night. Had weird dreams. One of them included a raging black BULL that someone let in my room to fight with me. It was intentional, like a prank or something. Like "hey, let's see what she does with this one". So I was terrified but true to form I decided to fight and see what happened. As luck would have it, I was a very skillful bullfighter and my superhuman ability to grab a bull by the horns and throw it down on it's back magically surfaced. It was quite exciting even if terrifying. I threw the bull down over and over but it never got tired or hurt enough to quit coming after me. I was unable to get it together enough to do it any severe damage, as I was always on the defense. I was standing on my dresser, and that gave me a height boost, but I began to wonder if I could hold out long enough to beat that bull. Right about then is when the scene changed and I found myself in the bathroom putting lotion on my newly acquired sunburn and pleasantly surprised at my sudden lack of body fat. I flexed my muscles in the mirror and thought "wow! That's cool! I wonder how THAT happened!". Next, I found myself hugging my aunt Sharon - because someone had just died. I don't know who died but it was incredibly painful and I woke up with that grief heavy on my chest. -- Except it wasn't GRIEF heavy on my chest, it was my cat, Hobbes, wanting to be fed.
So I got up and fed him and all was well in the world.

Tuesday, January 06, 2004

Things affecting my attitude today: Another crappy drive. Way crappy. And running out of windshield wiper fluid halfway to work. Seeing is important on a good day.
Driving 1.5 hours to a place I don't want to be anyway is a drag. A big, dragging drag BUMMER, dude.

ON a more POSITIVE note, for the first time ever, I tried deceit and betrayal as a strategy in Age of Kings the other night. I gave this one king everything he asked for and made "friends" with him while the whole time I was building my armies in his camp and setting him up for defeat. At the right time, I switched his status to "ENEMY" and proceeded to annihilate him.

"This grieves me." he said, "For I am thine Ally. I pray thee, do not make war with me."
He begged me endlessly to remain allies, but I stonily ignored his puny pleas for mercy.
BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! BWAAAHAHAHAHAAAAAA! BWAAAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAAA!

Monday, January 05, 2004

Happy New Year Y'all

Congrats to MMY for conquering the pepper spray training!! I'm in awe. The other day I had a raw throat for whatever reason and ate some reasonably hot food and proceeded to choke on into oblivion, so I can't imagine getting pepper spray IN the EYES ON PURPOSE. Not jealous, not one bit.
And way to go Hoop with the slicing and dicing. I hear you're doing very well at it and evangelizing the world. - And why not? You'd be good at just about anything you tried I imagine.

In other news, the drive today "sucked like the big sucky sucking things on the bottom of the fish tank that suck the crud off the rocks and stuff." - I can't take credit for that creative blurb and I can't remember who said it so I'm using quotes.
Anyway, the drive was about like that. Slimy roads and mucked up windshields make for a long long drive. Methinks me won't be doing this next winter.

The coffee's good though.
And that's a good thing.
think positive,
think positive,
think positive.....................

About Me

"My own movement of thought is not meant to be a straight point-to-point, linear line of march, but a horizontal exploration from one area of interest to another. There is no ultimate destination--no finish line to cross, no final conclusion to be reached. It's the way I feel about dancing--you move around a lot, not to get somewhere, but to be somewhere in time."
Robert Fulghum